Culture & Strategy Sharing Breakfast

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” — Peter Drucker. This is usually one of the first things you come across when exploring company culture. The problem is — it’s almost entirely wrong. It would be more accurate to say “Culture and strategy need to share the breakfast table”.

Culture is the operating system of your business. When your operating system doesn’t run effectively your computer doesn’t run effectively. If culture is the operating system then strategy is the program you need to run. Attempting to run your program smoothly on a faulty operating system…we can all relate to how well that works out.

Strategy without culture isn’t going to get you anywhere. Programs with no operating system to run on are all but useless. In the same way — culture without strategy is destined for failure. An operating system with no programs is also not going to get you anywhere.

So if culture eats strategy for breakfast — yours might be a great place to come and work each day — but it might not be around for too long.